Rewinding the Review, December 9 2007: Sam Tanenhaus to Run Week In Review

Quick update to today's Review of the New York Times Book Review: I've now heard the news that Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus will be adding the Sunday "Week In Review" section to his editorial duties, replacing Katy Roberts. I'm disappointed to hear this.

The Week In Review is my second favorite section in the Sunday New York Times, and (like the Magazine, and like Arts and Leisure) it boasts a great literary reach. For instance, today's Week In Review features Dave Eggers with a solid article about the depths of money-grubbing in modern presidential campaigns. Sam Tanenhaus has his own impressive literary reach, of course, but Tanenhaus's tastes have always seemed to skew towards the dustier bastions of highbrow culture, and I don't think we'll be seeing much of Dave Eggers once Tanenhaus is running the Week in Review.

As for the political angle, Sam Tanenhaus is now being regularly identified as a "neo-conservative" (see Observer article, above), and his reviewer selections for the Book Review seem to bear this out.

Over its long history, the New York Times has had an excellent record of progressive journalism, and the Week in Review is part of this record. In our decade, many have faulted the New York Times for failing to report as aggressively and skeptically as possible on the justification for the war in Iraq, and many feel the Times has abandoned its historic position as a leader in investigative reporting on critical national and international issues.

The Week in Review section has always been a part of this historic position, and I wish the Times had picked an editor with a more groundbreaking journalistic bent to play this influential role.

I am glad, though, that the Times is beginning to ease Sam Tanenhaus out of his uncomfortable perch atop the New York Times Book Review (I expect and hope that a new editor of the NYTBR will be announced shortly, possibly with Tanenhaus continuing to oversee). Today's announcement may be good news for the Book Review, but it's not good news for the New York Times.

Herta who? The Nobel news from Stockholm left, as usual, a lot of people scratching their heads. Who is Herta Muller and why haven’t we heard more about her? As someone who has spent almost a decade working to bring the best new international literary work to America, I felt a particular frustration at those first reports: once again, Nobel coverage seemed to be descending into churlishness rather than an eagerness to share important international voices.

I wouldn't make a very good creationist, since I believe completely in Darwin's theory of natural selection and human evolution. I know that the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly persuasive. I find most religious creation myths childish and inane, and I've been known to snicker about creationist museums in Kentucky or Miss USA Pageant candidates who find the question "should evolution be taught in school?" hilariously tough to answer.

However, I try to check myself before laughing too hard, or else I might commit my own fallacy and conclude too glibly that anyone who does not believe in Darwinism today must be mentally addled or badly miseducated. I might allow myself to feel intellectually superior to creationists, and this would be a dangerous overstep.

This image is a real screenshot from a real website -- the victory website that went live after the polls closed on USA election day 2012, because apparently, stunningly, incredibly ... Mitt Romney's staff was that sure that they would win. They had given unconditional orders -- unconditional! -- to launch the website when the election ended.

Three days after the election, the revelation that not only Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan but their entire entourage and staff were sure they would win is still rocking the world. It turned out that Romney spent the evening of election day stewing in his hotel room with his yes-man entourage, doing nothing but smoothing out the final draft of his acceptance speech. The prior evidence that they would lose was, of course, rather overwhelming. Nate Silver, the most influential poll analyst in the world, a nonpartisan observer who in the past had correctly predicted Republican victories as well as Democratic ones, had already announced that in the New York Times that polling numbers strongly favored President Obama. The Obama administration knew it would win, and said so. I knew Obama would win. Even Bob Dylan knew Obama would win.

I've been trying to develop a theory on this blog -- a theory that I'm finding difficult to explain because the basic idea is so obvious that it barely merits the lofty term 'theory'. And yet it must be a theory, because its implications are important, and stand in surprising contrast to the way we tend to think about global conflicts ...

A few months ago, we discussed the disturbing suggestion that there could ever be a rulebook for drone warfare. Most of us are horrified by the fact that remote-control killer aircraft is now a "thing", and we should be ...

If you care about your personal privacy, and if you don't like the government snooping into your phone records and Internet activities, you ought to be a pacifist. The culture of militarism will never be consistent with a culture of privacy.

Herta who? The Nobel news from Stockholm left, as usual, a lot of people scratching their heads. Who is Herta Muller and why haven’t we heard more about her? As someone who has spent almost a decade working to bring the best new international literary work to America, I felt a particular frustration at those first reports: once again, Nobel coverage seemed to be descending into churlishness rather than an eagerness to share important international voices.

I wouldn't make a very good creationist, since I believe completely in Darwin's theory of natural selection and human evolution. I know that the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly persuasive. I find most religious creation myths childish and inane, and I've been known to snicker about creationist museums in Kentucky or Miss USA Pageant candidates who find the question "should evolution be taught in school?" hilariously tough to answer.

However, I try to check myself before laughing too hard, or else I might commit my own fallacy and conclude too glibly that anyone who does not believe in Darwinism today must be mentally addled or badly miseducated. I might allow myself to feel intellectually superior to creationists, and this would be a dangerous overstep.

This image is a real screenshot from a real website -- the victory website that went live after the polls closed on USA election day 2012, because apparently, stunningly, incredibly ... Mitt Romney's staff was that sure that they would win. They had given unconditional orders -- unconditional! -- to launch the website when the election ended.

Three days after the election, the revelation that not only Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan but their entire entourage and staff were sure they would win is still rocking the world. It turned out that Romney spent the evening of election day stewing in his hotel room with his yes-man entourage, doing nothing but smoothing out the final draft of his acceptance speech. The prior evidence that they would lose was, of course, rather overwhelming. Nate Silver, the most influential poll analyst in the world, a nonpartisan observer who in the past had correctly predicted Republican victories as well as Democratic ones, had already announced that in the New York Times that polling numbers strongly favored President Obama. The Obama administration knew it would win, and said so. I knew Obama would win. Even Bob Dylan knew Obama would win.

I've been trying to develop a theory on this blog -- a theory that I'm finding difficult to explain because the basic idea is so obvious that it barely merits the lofty term 'theory'. And yet it must be a theory, because its implications are important, and stand in surprising contrast to the way we tend to think about global conflicts ...

A few months ago, we discussed the disturbing suggestion that there could ever be a rulebook for drone warfare. Most of us are horrified by the fact that remote-control killer aircraft is now a "thing", and we should be ...

If you care about your personal privacy, and if you don't like the government snooping into your phone records and Internet activities, you ought to be a pacifist. The culture of militarism will never be consistent with a culture of privacy.